The present invention relates to shirt collars made of knitted fabric and, more particularly, to collar constructions adapted to resist the tendency or potential for knitted fabrics to curl at a fabric edge and to methods of fabricating collars so as to impart such curl-resistant characteristics.
Sportswear, in general, and knitted sport shirts, in particular, have grown in popularity over recent years. Such sport shirts are typically designed for casual wear, sports activities such as golf, and the like. As such, such sport shirts are most commonly fabricated from knitted textile fabrics owing to the greater flexibility, stretchability and comfortable hand of such fabrics, and in turn better performance of such shirts during sports and casual activities, as compared to woven fabrics. Knitted sport shirts typically include a knitted fabric collar, almost always made as a separate fabric component. Most typically, knitted sport shirt collars are formed on a flatbed knitting machine best suited to fashioning the collar to desire dimensions and contours and with finished edges.
One disadvantage of conventional flatbed-knitted sport shirt collars is that such collars tend to curl at the edges of the knitted fabric, particularly the angular corner edges which border the neck opening of a sport shirt. Such collars are ordinarily formed of a rib knit structure, which presents an identically knitted fabric surface on both front and back faces of the fabric and thereby exhibits a somewhat greater tendency of the fabric to hold a flattened condition and to resist curling. Even so, knitted sportswear collars still tend to curl at the edges, particularly after the garment has been washed.
It has been proposed in the past to form such knitted sport shirt collars with pockets containing plastic stays strategically located at the edges of the collar, as a means of imparting to the collar structure a defined shape which resists a tendency of the knitted fabric to curl at its edges. U.S. Pat. No. 3,286,278, issued to R. R. O'Connor, U.S. Pat. No. 6,167,732 issued to Friedman, and U.S. Pat. No. 6,862,743 also issued to Friedman disclose differing approaches to this concept. Specifically, the O'Connor patent suggests the formation of the pocket to be oversized in relation to the plastic stay to enable the stay to be easily inserted, but in turn the stay can tend to shift and move within the pocket, which detracts both from the appearance of the collar and from the effectiveness of the stay in retaining the collar shape and resisting curling. Friedman U.S. Pat. No. 6,167,732 suggests, by contrast, forming the pocket of a width nearly identical to, or at least closely matched to, that of the stay to prevent shifting of the stay within the pocket, but in actual practice, such construction increases the difficulty during manufacture to insert the stay. As a result, it is believed that collars actually manufactured according to the Friedman patent are formed with a buttonhole-like opening in the underside of the collar fabric to facilitate insertion of the stay, as described in Friedman U.S. Pat. No. 6,862,743, but during laundering and wearing of the sport shirt, the stay can tend to work its way out of the pocket through the hole, thereby defeating the purpose of the stay.